Anne of Windy Poplars

or
"Well, all I hope is it won't be a case of marrying in haste and repenting at leisure."

I thought I would do one entry for the rest of the Anne series. But that would have been mammoth. So I split 'em up.

I'm including a list of the books, in order of when they take place, along with their original publication dates. I reported on Anne of the Island before on this blog; since then I finished the rest of the series:

Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Anne of Avonlea (1909)
Anne of the Island (1915)
Anne of Windy Poplars (1936)
Anne's House of Dreams (1917)
Anne of Ingleside (1939)
Rainbow Valley (1919)
Rilla of Ingleside (1920)

I did a little bit of research this time around and found that my two least favorite Anne books are the ones that were actually written out of the chronology of the characters' lives, long after the initial series was finished. It explains a lot. Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne of Ingleside are the books most guilty of treating Anne Shirley in a way that I find to be too nostalgic, too obviously foisting her classic traits on the reader and too liberally abandoning the narrative of the books to place Anne in wacky matchmaking schemes and/or hilarious misunderstandings in which she eventually wins friends and fans. And the stakes in these two later books just don't seem high enough, with a couple of exceptions in Anne of Ingleside. At times, they seem like an indulgence for lovers of the earlier Anne books. Imagine if, fifteen years from now, J.K. Rowling wrote another Harry Potter book that took place between books two and three and was mostly about entertaining and inconsequential bits from Ron's and Hermione's summer vacations or Harry's journals from Privet Drive. Or something.

Anne of Windy Poplars (#4/1936) covers the three years of Anne's long-distance engagement. Her fiance is in medical school, and she is boarding as the principal of a school in another town on P.E.I. A lot of the book is presented in the form of letters from Anne to Gilbert - it alternates between her first-person narrative (the only time in the series we get to experience Anne's unfiltered point of view) and the normal close third person. The big stories are Anne's struggle with the clannish Pringle family's grudge against her, and Anne's attempts to break through to the unhappy and unfriendly Katherine Brooke, a fellow teacher. Katherine Brooke's story has always been a favorite of mine; it's a good example of Montgomery's willingness to explore characters and situations that aren't as sparkly and blessed as Anne's own world. Though, in most cases with these less fortunate characters, all turns out well in the end, it usually takes some sort of major trial or agony or revelation or leap of faith to bring about the happy ending. This book has some great parts (and, really, no book is a waste that introduces Rebecca Dew to the world), but it does include a lot of that tiresome Adventures With Anne business that I just don't enjoy very much. Seriously, how many people's lives does she have to improve by happy accident and well-intentioned nosiness?! If you ever want to know which of these stories I still love in spite of myself, just ask. That's another entry.